Catholic Worker House targeted by city, neighbors

By Gilbert Garcia :
April 16, 2013
: Updated: April 17, 2013 12:43am

In recent years, the Catholic Worker House has been in a state of perpetual crisis.

The charitable group, which has been operating on the East Side since 1985, does admirable work, serving 400 meals a day and providing clothing and hygiene products to the local homeless population.

But CWH is also an exile in its own neighborhood, viewed by some residents of Dignowity Hill as a major source of problems in their community.

The tension between the two factions has surfaced again over the past week, with the city's Development Services Department — in response to a community complaint — citing CWH for violating its certificate of occupancy by serving food from an unlicensed location.

Catholic Worker House shut down its food services Friday evening and is currently in a state of limbo. When city health inspectors visited CWH's Nolan Street headquarters Tuesday, they were unable to make an inspection because the building was closed.

There are two issues at play here: the official one that's driving the city's effort and the real one that's motivating neighbors to get the city involved.

The city argues that CWH is defying a local ordinance that prevents an establishment from preparing food without a licensed kitchen. That issue first flared up in August 2009, when the city shut down CWH's kitchen.

Shortly after that, the charity seemed to render the issue moot by moving next door to a new home that did not have a kitchen. From that point on, CWH simply handed out meals prepared for it by local restaurants (and services such as Chow Train, a charitable food truck enterprise created by local homeless advocate Joan Cheever).

CWH frequently uses crock pots to reheat those previously prepared meals, however, and from the city's perspective, that's a problem.

Dr. Chris Plauche, a retired pediatrician who is the de facto director of Catholic Worker House, is mystified by the city's emphasis on the issue of reheated food.

“I'm not quite sure what they (city inspectors) are looking for,” Plauche said. “All I know is we don't cook food from scratch.”

Truth be told, the people who are instigating these investigations — the community members who've made four complaints to the city in the past 20 months about CWH — are not worried about the quality of the food being served or the possibility that CWH's clients could get sick from eating it.

They're angry about what's happened in Dignowity Hill since CWH's clientele exploded about three years ago. (The city's effort to direct its homeless population to Haven for Hope by shutting down many downtown feeding centers had the unintended effect of dramatically increasing activity around the Catholic Worker House.)

“We have people laying on the porch, sleeping on the porch, sleeping in the back, going to the neighbors' homes begging for money, peeing in their yards, and hanging out in the alleys and drinking,” said Dee Smith, president-elect of the Dignowity Hill Neighborhood Association.

If the city decides to permanently shut down CWH's food program, it may be forced to defend its actions in a courtroom.

In a case with serious parallels to CWH's recent municipal battles, the city of Dallas recently found itself on the receiving end of a lawsuit from two religious charitable institutions over a city food establishment ordinance requiring groups that feed the homeless to provide restrooms and hand-washing facilities.

On March 15, U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis found that Dallas had violated the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1999 law stipulating that state and local governments “must show a compelling public reason, such as protection of public health or safety, before limiting the practice of religion.”

If there's a “compelling public reason” for this city to tamper with CWH, it has little to do with food safety (the ostensible justification) and everything to do with the popular will of a frustrated neighborhood.